A southern hemisphere mother writes about the world

Nurturing a misogynist culture

The story this morning on the front page of the SMH about the students at an all male college of Sydney University and their proud “pro-rape”culture was horrifying. But it was also not altogether surprising. The colleges at Sydney University seem to be mostly continuations of the elite private schools – students from the city whose parents can afford to give them the college experience, and students from the country who could afford boarding school. And those schools have long been the kind of places that inculcate a sense of superiority in their students – they are deserving of their place at the top of the pile. The extension of that, in the male college, to feeling entitled to whatever they want from the nearby women isn’t that big a leap. Mary at Hoyden about Town (who has been there) describes the culture and what it looks like from the inside.

My personal reaction, though, was to revisit my thinking about single sex schools. I’ve posted before that I don’t want to send my boys to a boys’ school. And that’s partly been because I worry that boys deprived of female company for six years might be too nervous or shy to talk to women as the real human beings they are. But that’s not the worst thing that could happen. After six years with boys as their main peer group (particularly if they are boys with a sense of entitlement), they might think that women are subhuman objects who are only there for male pleasure.

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I’ve been reading some great posts about how disgusting these guys are, and that the college environment fosters their sense of entitlement, but what I’m not seeing anywhere is what to do about it. Maybe that will come tomorrow. Although, if we knew what to do about it we wouldn’t be here, would we? There’s clearly something wrong with our primary and secondary school system if guys are getting to university and behaving this way.

Not just the schools, but entertainment, sports, and how can I do better at home? I have no idea, I know son’s little friends are starting to look at entry-level porny stuff and make sexist jokes already (age 12-13). How to talk to them without just coming across as a granny type who can be safely dismissed.

I checked the origins of St Paul’s, surprised that it had been founded by Anglicans rather than Roman Catholics.

My secondary school was originally all male, but females started enrolling when I was in Year 10. At Uni, I lived in a college that had only recently started enrolling males. So, I’ve got probably as close a perspective as anyone can of being a student of single-sex institutions of both varieties.

While this was back in the 70s, I must admit that the non-RC colleges that had been traditionally women only, were much more egalitarian in all sorts of ways. Of course, the women’s colleges lacked the “tradition” of the older colleges with an all male history – and a long history of privilege – which continued through richer students being able to pay more to avoid “domestic duties” each week (kitchen work, cleaning, etc), sons of old boys getting premier rooms (e.g. large, with fireplaces, etc), and also, have much more offensive/dangerous initiation/hazing activities.

In other words, the relatively underprivileged students of the more modern women’s colleges were better off than students of the same background in older colleges that had been all male.

While it cannot be universally supplied, I think the best environment for living and learning was a college where women greatly outnumbered males. The low concentration of testosterone (and dominance of females in student councils) led to snaggyness (even in the 70s!) among the males, while there were just enough males to stop the worst of the bitch-bullying between females.

St Paul’s which advertises itself as the oldest uni college in Australia may well be misogyistic, but the disgusting behaviour of some of the students may at least in part be the product of a continuation of anti-egalitarian tradition. If a sense of superiority in such a place were to continue, in a time without a sense of noblesse oblige, it would not be surprising if the more privileged students looked down on others as children of a lesser god… females just being one form of things to look down on.

My guess is that when these worst and most obvious excesses are controlled, there’ll still be nasty attitudes at St Pauls to other minorities. Does anybody have a profile breakdown by race / religion at St Pauls compared to the whole-of-australia uni college average?